


All The Arts

by Chamerion



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Markarth Incident, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:25:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2806004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chamerion/pseuds/Chamerion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Markarth, 4E 181. A story about fathers and sons, about paying tribute, and about the power of words even at their most inadequate. </p><p>Or, why Ulfric Stormcloak had to smuggle that letter out of prison.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The Arts

**Author's Note:**

> _"I suppose / little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting, / shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting. / Well, that's what I learnt."_  
>  \--Wilfred Owen, "A Terre"

 

He refuses to show a reaction.

Ulfric’s heart is beating slow and heavy in his chest, a plodding thump like a mammoth’s stride or the tortuous limp of a wounded man. But he will not show a reaction. With a steady hand he folds the missive in thirds along its creases and then lets it drop to his side, grasping the parchment between loose fingers. Reins his breathing to a walk, with the practice of a man brutally schooled in silent endurance. His father is dead.

The messenger is staring at him. One of his jailers, some smooth-faced boy still wet behind the ears. Ulfric wonders if it is gloating or pity that keeps him in place. Either possibility sets him alight with rage. He lifts his chin, fixes the guard with a gaze like the stalhrim blades of ancient Nordic legend.

“May I keep it?” he asks, coldly. “Or do you require it back?”

“No,” mutters the boy. “Yes. Keep it, I mean.” He flees down the corridor.

Only when the hasty slap of soft boots on stone fades to a distant echo does Ulfric put his back to a wall and open the letter again, fine vellum rustling in his hands. His thumb skates over blue wax, half a bear’s-head in relief. The seal was already broken when they gave it to him. They read all his mail – not that he receives much of it. The hand is spidery and spiked like a forest of conifer trees, and he might have recognized it as Wuunferth’s even without the signature. Formal phrases. _It is my painful duty to inform you...rule of the hold will be managed until your return by...with all honors in the Hall of the Dead...await your reply._ At the bottom of the page is a splatter of ink, a violent dark line as though the man was struggling to phrase himself properly. The words that follow are more curt than courtly. _I am sorry. Your father loved you very much._

The convulsive clench of his fists makes the parchment crumple.

It requires a reply. That much is clear. He has papers, a quill; they allow him these at least. There is another hour of light before the sun sinks too low to edge through the slice of window – an old arrowslit, really – and slant across the desk. Ulfric sits. He cannot trim the pen nib because he has no knife, but he has managed to keep it fairly sharp through careful scraping on the stone walls. He thinks they will probably continue to provide him with replacements, as they have when previous quills became useless. He prefers not to test the theory. He does not like to be beholden to his captors.

Ulfric smooths out a sheet. He dips the quill. Sets it upright on the parchment. The ink blots and he lifts his hand, sets it down again more lightly. He watches the iron in the inkblot darken slowly to black. The room darkens too. The narrow sunbeam drips down the dungeon wall, trickles slowly across the parchment, and finally beads in a droplet on the edge of the desk and then falls away, into nothing.

Words have always come easily to him. Even the dragon tongue came easily, in relative terms. Now, as he grasps for some fitting tribute, his head and his heart feel hollow. He cannot construct even inadequate phrases, and it frightens him. After all he has endured, _this_ frightens him: finding himself bereft of what has always flowed so naturally. It makes him wonder if he is losing his mind.

But there is nothing else to do in prison, no way to escape from himself, and when he wakes he forces himself to try again – because if he is not mad already, having this duty hanging over his head will certainly drive him so.

 _My father taught me how to shoot a bow,_ he writes. It’s the truth. Ulfric took to the axe and the sword like a born warrior, but he struggled with archery, and his weapons master struggled to teach him. He was a stubborn and sensitive child. He hated to fail, at anything, and when he could not strike the targets he learned to hate the lessons. His father took him out on the Aalto for a hunting trip, with his great ebony-braced recurve too tall for Ulfric to lift, let alone draw. He merely followed while his father stalked a big elk among the sulfur pools, stiff with excitement and fear that some mistake on his part might alert their prey. He recalls his father showing him how dress the beast, not looking much the jarl with the sleeves of his rough wool shirt shoved up past the elbows and his hands in the animal’s steaming ribcage. It was only after they made camp and roasted the meat – after they had tasted the practical reward for their labor – that the Bear of Eastmarch revealed that he had indeed brought his son’s own bow along, unstrung and hidden in the saddlebags of his horse. _A thing is not less worth doing because it is hard, Ulfric,_ he’d said. _Ofttimes it is more worth doing. You can slay your enemy with a blade, but you can’t fight on an empty stomach._ Two days later, he finally succeeded in shooting a rabbit.

He crosses it out. It belongs to him. There is precious little, Ulfric has learned, that cannot be taken from him – not even the contents of his mind and memory – but still he cannot bring himself to give it away so freely, to mourners he does not know at a funeral he will not see.

 _My father taught me life’s most important lessons,_ he writes. It is mostly a lie. His mother taught him to read, to love the meaning and the music of the words. Arngeir taught him the beauty of ideas. The Legion taught him command, camaraderie, tactics. Elenwen taught him survival.

The quill snaps, halfway through penning another safe and reverential lie. Breaks right in the center of the shaft when he grips too tightly, and stabs his hand hard enough to draw blood. Ulfric startles, and then flings it away in a fury. Stares at it. Five years. Five years in the dark, angry and unrepentant and mostly sane and now he is going to have to beg his captors for a quill so that he may pen his own father’s eulogy. Talos knows what they will ask for in return. Thus far they have not attached conditions to the small comforts they provide him, but that does not mean they _won’t_ —

His breath is coming too fast. Ulfric shoves back from the desk, scrambles to his cot in the corner to brace himself with his back to the wall and his hand on the strangely shaped paving stone in the floor, jutting, distinctively textured. Counts the chips (there are three). Runs his touch over its rough edges, the worn hollow near the center. Paints the stone in his mind, fingers tracing along behind to confirm that the picture is correct. It is a ritual he knows. It is just like High Hrothgar, grounding himself so deeply in the smooth granite floor or the fraying woolen cuff of his robes that when the time came he only had to open his hand to loose anchor and meditate on the dragon words.

 _Breath and focus_. He opens his eyes. Of all men on earth, Ulfric Stormcloak knows that words can serve as a shield – or as a weapon.

He picks up the broken quill. Starts again. It stabs viciously at his palm with every stroke.

 _Valbjorn, the Bear of Eastmarch, was a mighty warrior and a fine jarl, and in the songs they will remember him thus. But he was also a man. He was a friend. He was a husband. He was my father. My father loved fiercely that which was his. As I write this I know that it will be read from the steps before the Palace of the Kings, and that a crowd will gather to listen. Not for my words, but for respect of the man that they honor. My father’s people loved him, because they knew that they were loved. He believed he ought to sacrifice for them, and not the other way around._ His jailers will read this, he knows. Ulfric writes: _That is a rare quality in a ruler, these days._

It’s achingly true and breathtakingly insincere, rebellion cloaked in grief, a call to arms disguised as a tribute. For what else is paying tribute, but a reminder to the defeated of all he has lost? If a man’s to beggar himself, then he may as well poison the enemy’s spoils. Ulfric has not even a knife to trim his quill, but he still has this.

He did not know his father, he realizes, even as more incendiary lines take shape. Not as one warrior to another. Not as a grown man knows his sire. To his son Valbjorn of Eastmarch is a collection of half-recalled images and sensations, worn like the sketch of a dragon in one of his well-loved childhood books. He knows that the man had large hands – remembers how heavy they felt when they ruffled his hair as a child, and how one big paw clasped his own before he marched for Cyrodiil and still seemed so, though Ulfric was then a man grown. He knows that he loved Ulfric’s mother, refused to marry again after she was gone. He knows well the sight of his handwriting. But he did not know the unerring ways to make him laugh, the beliefs he cherished above all else, could not predict what he might have said before even the man had said it. He could tell all of those things and more about Arngeir, though he will never see that man again either.

Ulfric wonders whether his blood-father would be proud of him, as his mentor most certainly is not. The man had seemed so, when he left to fight with the Legions, but Ulfric is not now the same man that he was then. Some days he barely feels a man at all. Certainly not one of the men from the songs he has always loved so well, the proud warriors who believed in loyalty and honor above all, who would die before betraying that which they loved best. And yet he wants to believe that there is still something in him worthy of a father’s pride. That pushing back at the world counts for something. That is part of why he went to Markarth in the first place: so that when he finally returned home, he might look the Bear of Eastmarch in the eye and feel something else besides his crushing shame.

 Now he will never have the chance.


End file.
